I saw a post today about the release of UEK4, so now you have access to all the improvements in the 4.1 mainline Linux kernel, whether you are on are running OL6 or OL7. That just goes to prove the point really.

We have a 3rd party Java-based application that runs on Tomcat 7 and Java 7 that until recently was running on RHEL5 on physical hardware. It runs against an Oracle database, but that is not housed on this server. This application is not that big, but it is *very* high profile as it is what we use to process our REF submissions. If you know anything about higher education in the UK, you’ll know that REF is a very big deal, especially as we are within a couple of months of the next submission.

I spent today updating my Oracle 11gR2 RAC installation on OL6 article. The original article used an older version of VirtualBox , which meant some of the screen shots looked a little dated. It’s now updated to VirtualBox 4.2.6, so it should be a little less confusing for anyone who is new to VirtualBox.

I’ll probably update the OL5 RAC article some time this next week, since that article uses VirtualBox 3.2.8, which is pretty much ancient history now.

Last month I wrote about a problem I saw with scsi_id and UDEV in OL5.8. As it screwed up all my UDEV rules is was a pretty important issue for me. It turned out this was due to a mainline security fix (CVE-2011-4127) affecting the latest kernels of both RHEL/OL5 and RHEL/OL6. The comments on the previous post show a couple of workarounds.

Over the weekend I started to update a couple of articles that mentioned UDEV rules (here and here) and noticed the problem had dissapeared. I updated two VMs (OL5.8 and OL6.2) with the latest changes, including the UEK updates and ran the tests again and here’s what I got.

I just did an update from Oracle Linux 5.7 to 5.8 on one of my VirtualBox RAC installations and things are not looking to clever at the moment. After a reboot, the ASM instances and therefore the database instances wouldn’t restart. A quick look showed the ASM disks were not visible. On this installation I was using UDEV, rather than ASMLib. In checking the UDEV rules I noticed the scsi_id command on OL5.8 doesn’t report an ID for partitions on disks, only the disks themselves. For example, on OL5.7 I get this,